Body Identified As Ex-high Court Justice

November 14, 1986|Orlando Sentinel

A man who died of cancer Tuesday night in a Jacksonville hospital was positively identified Thursday as former Florida Supreme Court Justice David McCain, who has been a fugitive on drug smuggling charges since 1983.

Fingerprints taken from the body Thursday matched earlier prints taken after McCain`s arrests in September and October 1982 on federal and state drug conspiracy charges in Louisiana, authorities said.

``It was a positive I.D.,`` said FBI spokesman George Wisnovsky in Jacksonville. ``The case is closed.``

McCain had been using the alias Thomas Sam Mills, 55, of Jacksonville. He died Tuesday night at Baptist Hospital in Jacksonville, where he had been treated for an unspecified form of cancer.

FBI officials in Florida and Louisiana said they would not investigate the possibility that friends or relatives may have harbored McCain while he was a fugitive.

McCain`s wife, Joyce, and three children could not be reached for comment Thursday. Officials at the Hardage-Giddens Funeral Home in Jacksonville said family members identified the body Thursday.

One of McCain`s two stepdaughters, Diane Cossin, 31, of Miami, said she and her family were devastated by the news of his death.

``It was amazing to me that he was able to survive for this long. He was a very strong-willed person,`` said Cossin, a legislative aide to state Sen. Dexter Lehtinen, a Democrat from the South Florida town of Perrine. ``This was not a life he had led. His entire career in life had been devoted to justice.``

McCain, 55, of Fort Pierce, wascharged in late 1982 with conspiring to smuggle more than 30,000 pounds of marijuana into the United States in an ill- fated drug deal. He was accused of paying a group of fishermen $28,000 to pick up Colombian pot. He failed to appear for arraignment in January 1983.

In July 1983, McCain was among 200 people charged in Operation Everglades, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration investigation into marijuana smuggling rings. The rings operated out of Everglades City, a fishing village in South Florida.

The revelation about McCain`s masquerade started to unravel after Duval County State Attorney Ed Austin said he received a tip from a ``totally reliable`` source Wednesday that McCain had died and was in a funeral home under the name Mills.

Austin said he ran a police computer check and found that McCain was still a fugitive and later had investigators verify that Mills was McCain.